Category: Blog

François Hollande’s victory in the French elections raises all sorts of interesting questions, not all of them related to France’s sovereign debt. Such as:

Will Carla stay married to Sarko? My guess is she probably won’t: she doesn’t look like a ‘for better or for worse’ kind of girl. It’s one thing for this ex-model to marry a President of France; quite another to stay married to a failed politician wearing elevator shoes when out and presumably elevator slippers when in.

Will Sarko’s rich friends stay his friends? Same answer. Rich people anywhere, and in France especially, seldom befriend politicians for disinterested reasons. Their admiration for the politician’s sterling personal qualities tends to diminish when he loses clout.

Will François marry his live-in girlfriend? Again, probably not: he lived with Ségolène Royal for 30 years and sired her four children without ever tying the knot. Unlike the thrice-married Sarko, he doesn’t seem to believe in the institution of marriage – or probably any other traditional institution either. He’s a socialist, isn’t he?

And what is it about both contestants’ women? One was serially attracted to pop ‘musicians’ and nude photo sessions, the other is a pugnacious feminist who throws punches in public. Both, in other words, are showy on the outside and rather vacuous inside. Come to think of it, the same can be said about their men’s policies.

It’s Hollande’s proposed policies that raise a more serious question: will he ever learn to think about economics without stumbling over one non sequitur after another? Take his views on growth and austerity. These, he evidently thinks, exist in inverse proportion: the more of one, the less of the other. That’s like saying that the more money one has, the less it rains. It’s not cabbages and kings; it’s apples and oranges.

Austerity and growth live on different planes: the former, in the public sector; the latter, in the private one. The two planes, however, defy Euclid and vindicate Lobachevsky in that they can intersect. And when they do, one notices that their relationship isn’t so much inverse as symbiotic.

As any serious economist will tell you, promiscuous government spending leads to huge debts, and huge debts lead to crises – especially in countries that aren’t free to set their exchange rates as they see fit. In the last quarter of last year, France’s national debt was €1,700 billion, 83 percent of her GDP. By comparison, her debt in 1985 was a dangerously high but still manageable 37.9 percent of GDP. The cost of servicing such a huge debt today must be similar to the country’s total budget in 1985.

François’s remedy? Dramatically increasing government spending, thus providing for growth – and damn the austerity. We, and obviously the French, are so conditioned to saluting whenever growth is run up the pole that we don’t distinguish good from bad growth. But it’s useful to remember that the private sector is like a muscle, and the public sector is like a malignant tumour. Either can grow, but with very different results.

Allow me to clarify. Let’s say a government borrows £100,000 and uses the money to hire an optimiser of facilitation. Then it borrows another £100,000 and hires a facilitator of optimisation. The country’s GDP has just grown by £200,000, but her economy has suffered serious fiscal damage, to say nothing of the moral kind. The muscle hasn’t grown; the tumour has.

It’s not as if France’s public sector needed beefing up. It already consumes 56 percent of the economy officially and considerably more unofficially, when you take into account all those supposedly private firms that wholly depend on government income. In Stalin’s Russia the corresponding figure was 80 percent, so the gap is closing. And we know what happens when égalité replaces libérté. Out of the window goes fratérnité.

I’m eagerly awaiting Angela’s reaction. She has staked her whole career on austerity, and her job prospects aren’t looking good. The Greeks appear likely to get a communist government (or as near as damn), something quite a few Englishmen died to prevent at the end of the big war. The Dutch are about to go the same way. Romania has had a change of government. So has Italy. So has Spain. And the French have elected François, thereby enlisting to fight his frankly idiotic ‘war on finance’.

I pity Angela. There she is, achieving with washing machines and toasters a feat the previous generation of Germans failed to achieve with tanks and Stukas. The eurozone countries can’t devalue their currency, which means they can’t compete against German goods on price. Competing on quality is the only way to stay afloat, and you know which way that’s going to go. They are in the doldrums, Germany rules, QED.

And now? She’ll fight tooth and polished nail to keep François et al from acting on their promises. But even if they succeed only partly, the euro will have to go, with the EU itself on its heels. Meanwhile, François et al will inflict the kind of misery on, among others, France that no austerity would. Really, while the EU with its open labour markets still exists, Dave should stand for office somewhere on the continent. Who knows, he might be taken for a statesman there. 

 

 

 

 

 

When a few years ago a Telegraph critic described Maxim Vengerov as ‘the best violinist not only of our time but of all time’, those who understood such matters cringed to the point of gurning. Referring in such terms to a vulgarian whose fiddling is as fast as it’s mindless was like calling Vinnie Jones the best footballer (or actor) of all time.

Since then I’ve known to take today’s musical criticism with a grain of salt, a wedge of lime and a glass of tequila. Clearly that genre has gone the way of musical performance – straight into the gutter. It’s as if writing and playing nonentities have colluded with a largely illiterate public to push real music down to the level of pop, long on cult appeal and short on musical content.

A few days ago I found more prima facie evidence of such a plot in an article written by a professional journalist but an amateur critic (call him AM for short). His name doesn’t matter – for my purposes he’s a phenomenon, not an individual.

He starts out by declaring in a tone that brooks no argument that ‘Beethoven is the Shakespeare of music’. Yes, and Shakespeare is the Praxiteles of drama, and Joyce the Schönberg of literature — such metaphors only ever hit the mark when they are witty (‘Wagner is the Puccini of music’).

But forgetting the lazy phrasing, the underlying assertion is that Beethoven is history’s best composer. This view, unlike say Enoch Powell’s worship of Wagner, is legitimate, though I happen to disagree with it. As a rule I refrain from ranking artists like athletes, but I make an exception for Bach, whose music to me represents the highest human, not merely musical, achievement.

Bach and Beethoven were antipodes in that, in a vector opposite to Beethoven’s, Bach looked back in his content and forward in his form. His inspiration came entirely from his own spirit, and his own spirit entirely from God. Beethoven, by contrast, drew some of his inspiration from the outer world around him, be that nature or, in say his Third Symphony or Fifth Piano Concerto, politics.

Bach revolutionised music for every instrument he knew, including the human voice, and some he didn’t know but anticipated with the prescience of a seer, such as the modern piano. But for all that, there was noble restraint in Bach’s music, a kind of artistic chastity that Beethoven often lacked.

Like a libertine who goes after anything with a pulse, Beethoven’s genius was splashing out in every direction, pursuing every possible or impossible idea to the bitter end. As a result, some of his music was bombastic, and some, especially his vocal work, not altogether convincing. Probably aware of this, he followed the classical form more rigidly than many listeners realise, and the popular view that he was the first Romantic composer has more to do with his spirit than his craft.

Still, let’s not argue about tastes. Beethoven was a genius, his overall output comparable to Bach’s, and our AM is within his right to place him on the highest perch. But having done so, AM then unleashes an uninterrupted stream of meaningless gibberish, of the kind that’s symptomatic of our time.

He claims that what he regards as Beethoven’s greatest achievements, his late sonatas and quartets, are ‘neglected by millions of intelligent, open-minded music lovers’. He includes Hammerklavier among such neglected pieces, whereas it rightfully belongs in the bombastic category (its great fugue apart), but let’s not quibble about that.

Let’s just say that, if such ‘music lovers’ do indeed neglect Beethoven’s superb late works, their minds are so open, their brains have fallen out. True, not many people walk around whistling the finale of Op. 111, but then one doesn’t hear them whistling Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Schumann’s Fantasy either. I’ll put it bluntly: anyone who knows and understands music knows Beethoven’s late or any other work well.

But it’s true that such overachievers aren’t counted in their millions. Here AM expects sublime artists to have the same broad appeal as that enjoyed by drugged-up plankton screaming amplified anti-capitalist obscenities all the way to the near-bankrupt capitalist bank.

Real music wasn’t written for millions; it was written for few by fewer. For even to begin to appreciate the grandeur of a Bach or Beethoven one has to have within his soul a particle of the same soaring spirit that animated their work, some semblance of the same discerning taste. Such people have never been thick on the ground, and they’re almost extinct in a civilisation where Freddie Mercury is taken seriously.

Real music can’t be democratic, with the public voting by the show of hands, each clutching banknotes. When it is, it stops being real music. As proof of this, most pieces performed widely were financed by private patrons, a majority of whom had refined taste cultivated from infancy. Without all those Electors, Archbishops and Margraves, playing the harpsichord or viola in their music rooms, we’d have no B Minor Mass or even Missa Solemnis. Democracy is more likely to deliver Jesus Christ Superstar, and this is a rule proved by rare exceptions, such as James McMillan’s St John’s Passion.

By bemoaning the narrow appeal of great music, our AM shows that he shares the philistine cravings of the multitudes. This impression is reinforced by his girlish gasps at the playing of HJ Lim, the sexy but giftless 24-year-old just signed by EMI.

Now if AM’s ranking of Beethoven was justifiable, his remarks on Lim show that he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. ‘Lim,’ he writes, ‘demolishes the stereotype of Asian pianists as mechanical virtuosos.’ That’s true in a way. Her banging, tasteless ‘virtuosity’ demolishes such stereotypes because she’s even worse than Lang Lang or Yuja Wang, which is saying a lot. Lim doesn’t understand the first thing about Beethoven and, in less barbaric times, wouldn’t have been let anywhere near his sonatas, late or early.

‘Her whirlwind technique renders familiar passages almost unrecognisable,’ continues AM. That’s also true: those who understand music wouldn’t recognise the passages mauled by Lim or other circus-type hacks, Asian, European or American, who’ve monopolised the world’s concert platforms.

Playing music they don’t really understand to a public that doesn’t really care, they do untold damage. And the likes of AM either exacerbate the damage or precipitate it, depending on your point of view. If, as Plato believed, music is the moral law, then we live in truly immoral times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Last Thursday, Gen. Nikolai Makarov, Chief of Russia’s General Staff, spoke with soldierly directness about NATO anti-missile defences in Eastern Europe.

‘A decision to use destructive force preemptively will be taken if the situation worsens,’ he announced, bringing back fond memories of the Cuban crisis. You may think the general spoke out of turn, but he didn’t. In fact, he merely repeated the threat issued by President Medvedev last year.

NATO replied that under no circumstances would it wish to undermine the Soviet nuclear deterrent. We wouldn’t even think of defending ourselves against Russia, said American officials, and shame on you for having such beastly suspicions. Our defence system is merely designed to protect the West against a highly plausible missile attack from rogue states, Iran specifically. To that end NATO plans to deploy sea-based Aegis radars and interceptors, along with a more powerful radar based in Turkey. Installed next will be radar and interceptor facilities in Romania and Poland.

It’s that last proposed site that has upset the Russians. Put those blasted things anywhere you want, but leave Poland alone, they screamed. Poland is ours, they didn’t scream, but strongly implied. You install a radar in Poland, and we’ll launch a missile attack. Meanwhile, just in case, the Russians installed their own powerful radar in Kaliningrad, née Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia.

This whole brouhaha raises interesting questions: Why do the Russians need a radar installation next door to Poland? Why do they object to NATO having similar facilities? Do they have the capability to act on their threat?

A truism first: radars are used for defence. They warn of an incoming threat in good time for activating countermeasures. As radar systems are costly, they’re placed mostly on strategically significant sites, those covering the likeliest directions of enemy action.

A quick glance at the map will show that the Kaliningrad radar can’t protect Russia from Iranian missiles, unless those wily ayatollahs choose to bend it like Beckham. No, that radar covers Russia only against an attack from the west, which is to say from NATO.

Now, both you and Putin know that NATO will never launch a preemptive strike against Russia. If they didn’t do it during the Berlin blockade, the massacre of Hungary, the Cuban crisis, or any of the Middle East and Far East wars in which the Soviets either fought on the side of the West’s enemies or at least armed them, they aren’t going to do so now. In fact, Western Europe is disarming faster than you can say ‘austerity’, and the US is shifting its focus away from Europe and towards the east.

Call me an alarmist, but the conclusion seems straightforward: the Kaliningrad installation is there to protect Russia from NATO’s second strike, not first. In the strategic plans hatched by Gen. Makarov’s General Staff, it’s Russia that’s supposed to deliver the first blow, and they’re deploying systems designed to neuter NATO’s retaliation. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not privy to Russia’s plans; this is pure speculation based on logic. I’d be open to other explanations, but I can’t think of any on my feeble own.

This logical induction would also explain the vehemence of the Russians’ stance. If their strategic plans indeed include a possible first strike against NATO, it stands to reason that NATO radars and interceptors in Eastern Europe are a direct threat. And the Russians know how to handle such situations: worldwide propaganda against US warmongering backed up by threats. They tried this dual stratagem when Reagan’s administration was deploying intermediate-range missiles in Europe, and that time it didn’t work. It just may work now.

The last question is, does Russia have the military wherewithal to make good her threats? Here I hasten to add another disclaimer: I don’t claim any specialised knowledge of Russia’s military capability. What encourages me to write on such matters is that those who do claim such expertise have for decades been consistently and spectacularly wrong in their analysis.

This applies even to retrospective analysis – some ‘military historians’ still peddle the lie that the Nazis routed the Soviet army in the summer of 1941 because they had a huge superiority in tanks, planes and other hardware. In fact, the Soviets enjoyed an overwhelming seven-fold superiority in tanks, a three-fold superiority in planes, a huge superiority in artillery pieces and, certainly, personnel. And their T-34 and KV tanks at the start of the war remained unmatched until its end. The Nazis won their initial victories because of their much better military leadership and morale – all the more impressive, considering they were badly outgunned.

Western analysts invariably either underestimated or, as with Kennedy’s phoney ‘missile gap’, overestimated Soviet strength. One can detect that at present they’re erring on the former side. Newspapers and military journals are full of stories about Russia’s failed missile tests, and her defeat in Afghanistan is still held up as proof of her weakness (presumably America’s performance in the same theatre is a sign of her strength).

In fact, the Russians are doing rather well in the military department. Their 10,500 km Topol-M missile systems, of which they already have 36, will in a couple of years become the mainstay of their strategic forces. The Topols will be land-based, sea-based (the submarine version is called Bulava, ‘mace’) or mobile, devilishly hard to detect. Though they’re supposedly reducing the number of their ICBMs to 2,012 (parity with the US), the Russians have a huge superiority in non-strategic nuclear weapons – some 8,000 to 15,000, as compared to America’s 300.

For as long as the price of oil remains sky-high, which probably means forever, the Russian KGB-run regime will be awash with cash. And numerous statements by Putin and other officials, backed up with deeds, show that Russia will spend much of her hydrocarbon revenues on building up her military muscle even further.

A criminal regime armed to the teeth and making threats ought to be taken seriously. It’s a dangerous mistake to think that Russian politicians are like Barack or Dave, chaps who’ll think one thing, say another and do a third just to be elected. Putin and his stooges don’t have to be elected, and they occasionally mean what they say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Any true meaning  of the word ‘posh’ vanished together with the mode of transportation from which this acronym derives. A jet circling around Heathrow has neither port nor starboard – there’s just the front and back of the plane, and where you sit depends only on how much you paid for the ticket.

Yet the word is still bandied about, usually pejoratively. The British are still fighting Victorian class battles, with the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. Except that the formerly rich man was taxed out of his castle long ago, while the erstwhile poor man has made a killing in fund management, bought the castle and converted it into Parvenu on the Park, luxury condominiums for the whole family.

The British have a convoluted relationship with Marxism. Marx built his slipshod theory on the correct observation that classes exist and the wrong assumption that they are innately antagonistic. Yet that part of Marxism struck a chord in the British heart, and the strings are still reverberating. What the British rejected was Marx’s notion that class was determined by the ownership of ‘the means of production’ – money, in other words.

Thus someone like the multi-millionaire Alan Sugar calls himself ‘working class’, and people nod their assent. On the other hand, a Sloanie living in a bedsit and spending his last 50 pounds on a gram of coke in a dingy nightclub is described as posh.

So it’s not money that determines class. What then? Accent? Most of our friends speak in cadences guaranteed to activate class hatred. But most of their children sound like chavs, djahmean? They mispronounce ‘waistcoat’, neglect to leave its bottom button undone and often don’t even own such a garment. Nor do they commit posh crimes: for example, a young aristo I know once knocked off a convenience shop in a very underprivileged way. After his stint at Her Majesty’s pleasure he started an internet porn business – again, not an undertaking his father would have instantly countenanced.

Does this mean the family has dropped several rungs down the social ladder in just one generation? It doesn’t. All it means is that our understanding of class is hopelessly outdated.

A brief glance at history will show that the greatest cultural achievements of Western societies date back to the time when the ruling classes were also the most cultured. Such societies were called aristocratic, and the driving force behind them wasn’t economic, as is wrongly assumed, but cultural. For in the West it was its culture that produced its civilisation, not the other way around.

Since Western civilisation came into being as a result of the great cultural upheaval 2,000 years ago, it had no option but to reflect culture faithfully and to preserve it vigilantly. Unfortunately, culture’s meat is civilisation’s poison and vice versa: in order to survive, the former has to be exclusive, and the latter has no option but to be inclusive.

The two had to be prevented from damaging each other, and this could only be achieved by concentrating political, financial and military power in the same few hands that fostered (though not necessarily produced) culture. This amounts to a working definition of an aristocratic society, which Britain more or less remained until 1914. Then out went the aristocracy, gassed in Flanders, taxed in Westminster. The social pack had to be reshuffled, and different cards ended up on top.

Surviving aristocrats lost the power to act as guardians of culture (in the broadest sense of the word), thereby losing their raison d’être and exiting stage left as a political force. ‘Left’ isn’t just a figure of speech here. Many of them realised that, by putting the clamps on the more dynamic classes, socialism would keep their own position safer for longer. This explains the seemingly paradoxical left leanings of many aristocrats, including, alas, some members of the royal family.

But the trick didn’t work because the conquering socialists, while detesting the enterprising classes, hated the aristocrats even more. Like that unfortunate Duc d’Orlèans, the British aristocrat tried to become a Philip Egalité, but, though allowed to keep his head, only succeeded in becoming irrelevant. The routing of the House of Lords and divesting the aristocracy of political power was an inevitable result.

That was a shame, for, say what you will about your Wellingtons, Salisburys, Pitts and Churchills, they sensed their umbilical link with millennia of English history, past and future. Imbued from early childhood with the notion of responsibility and service, they didn’t tend to put their own interests above their country. A Salisbury or Pitt wouldn’t have signed the Maastrich Treaty, and Wellington must have been an intutive eurosceptic. 

This brings us to Dave Cameron and other front-benchers who went to expensive schools, earning themselves the lifelong stigma of being ‘posh’. No doubt they’ve retained some posh mannerisms and cheap snobberies, but what they manifestly lack is the aristocratic sensibility of being at one with England.

In order to promote their petty aspirations they gladly abandon the outer quirks of poshness, never having been privy to its essence. Thus David has become Dave, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, come next election, he’ll push it closer to ‘Dive’. After all, his role model Blair learned, not always convincingly, how to use the glottal stop and drop his haitches (is that the proper pronunciation, Tone?). And Osborne will never become Prime Minister because his Christian (sorry, first) name doesn’t lend itself to egalitarian diminution. If he tried ‘Georgie’, it would only make matters worse.

In a way I pity these chaps. Deprived of true aristocratic spirit and culture, they’ve been cursed with quirky throwbacks that can only damage their careers. When opponents snipe at their schooling (not to be confused with education), Dave and George can’t even counter with ‘You wha’ mite?’ without sounding clownish. A tough life, too bad someone has to live it.

 

I must admit to a weakness: The Times is the leftmost newspaper I ever read. The reasons aren’t so much political as medical: I’m slightly hypertensive, and the pseudo-intellectual twaddle purveyed, say, by The Guardian makes the condition worse. Ten-quid words masking a tuppence of thought are guaranteed to add 30 diastolic points to my blood pressure. However, even Polly Toynbee couldn’t have damaged my health as much as the article I read in yesterday’s issue.

A Cambridge lecturer Abdal Hakim Murad (né Tim Winter) has converted to Islam. How a presumably educated Westerner can ever do that is beyond me, but I’d be interested to read his personal, well-reasoned account of what attracted him to a religion explicitly hostile to the West.

In general, I welcome arguments against anything I hold dear, provided they are a) intelligent, b) well-informed, c) logically sound, d) driven by a desire to find the truth rather than to score cheap agitprop points. An argument that meets these conditions can make me change my mind or at least treat my opponent with respect. Alas, Mr Murad’s article errs egregiously against a), b), c), d) and every other letter in the alphabet.

It’s natural for someone indulging in eccentric pursuits to put this down to some sweeping trend gaining momentum, rather than to his own quirk. In that spirit, Mr Murad cites a report stating that 100,000 Brits converted to Islam in the last decade – a 40,000 increase on the decade before. That’s supposed to cause a serious problem to ‘Islamophobes’, a term Murad reserves for those who have the slightest of problems with creeping Islamification. (The Murads of this world do tend to replace arguments with name-calling: anyone who doesn’t think women should lead bayonet charges is a ‘misogynist’, anyone who’s opposed to same-sex marriage is a ‘homophobe’, anyone who thinks university admissions should be based on merit only is either a ‘racist’ or an ‘elitist’.)

However, in the next sentence he specifies that three quarters of those ‘new Muslims’ are young women. Murad omits a critical datum: how many of these women have converted under pressure from their Muslim husbands or live-in boyfriends. Such omissions leave room for conjecture, and mine is that it’s probably most. Suddenly, the 100,000 number is edging towards an explanation that has little to do with purely God-seeking urges.

Most converts, as Murad half-admits, come from ‘some deprived areas, where the problem of failed relationships, drink and drugs has reached crisis proportions for many young people.’ So what do you know, not all new converts are Cambridge lecturers or aid workers, like Murad’s fellow convert Khalil Dale, brutally murdered in Pakistan by his new co-religionists.

And why, according to Murad, do all those people convert to Islam? Elementary theology, Dr Watson. They have ‘rejected Christianity because of the complexity of its belief system’. Specifically, they are attracted to ‘Islam’s simple monotheism’ because they ‘are bewildered by the doctrine of the Trinity’. Judging by what Murad has already told us about the conversion demographics, most ‘new Muslims’ would be bewildered by a nursery rhyme – they are the sort of folk who think ‘paediatrician’ is the same as ‘paedophile’.

But even they should be able to get their heads around the verse that encapsulates with divine simplicity the entire ‘complexity’ of Christianity: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you …’ Out of these 15 words, only one, ‘enemies’, has more than one syllable, and this word shouldn’t cause undue difficulties for Muslims.

They are, after all, attracted to the ‘simple monotheism’ of their own holy book that tells them: ‘The unbelievers are an open enemy to you.’ (4:101) ‘Slay them wherever ye find them…’ (2:91) ‘We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve.’ (3:151). There are 107 such simple verses in the Koran, conservatively counted. One can see how they would be so appealing to the minds shaped by ‘failed relationships, drink and drugs’.

Such simple truths have inspired the likes of Nicky Reilly, who tried to blow up a restaurant in Bristol with a nail bomb, shoe bomber Richard Reid and 7 July bomber Germaine Lindsay. The report from which the 100,000 number comes says the number of such converts represents a ‘very small minority’. (As did the Bolsheviks in 1917, and look what happened.) But Murad disavows such acts: ‘we refuse to be judged by the behaviour of our fundamentalists’.

Splendid. So what should you be judged by then? By the ‘saintly and fearless hero’ Khalil Dale who ‘watched the Iranian revolution in 1979… and sympathised with what he saw as a believing people’s revolt against a cruel Western-backed autocrat.’ If those wild-eyed Khomeini fanatics were ‘believing people’, give me atheists any day and twice on Sunday. Any Westerner who didn’t see them for what they were, ought to have had his head examined.

Though I suspect Mr Murad is beyond help or any rational argument, I’d be happy to explain to him, in words of one syllable, the ‘bewildering doctrine of the Trinity’, or – assuming he can read – recommend a few simple books on the subject. What I wish someone would explain to me is how a formerly reputable newspaper can publish such drivel.

 

 

 

Call our state totalitarian, and there will be millions of hands indignantly thrown up in the air. After all, Britain manifestly lacks the outer attributes we associate with totalitarianism: barbed wire, watch towers, skeletal prisoners.

Yet if we delve under the surface, we’ll find that, though so far eschewing all those ghastly things, our state has laid the same groundwork that made them possible elsewhere. For, like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, it has effectively replaced traditional morality with a self-serving kind. The method used to achieve this terrifying end is also similar: systematic brainwashing, ably boosted by an educational system whose purpose seems to be to benumb people’s minds.

Anything that advances the cause of communism is moral, explained Lenin, anything that doesn’t isn’t. Replace communism with the Aryan race, and Hitler’s dicta were identical. But such pronouncements mostly served PR purposes. Their underlying meaning was that for the Bolsheviks and the Nazis morality was coextensive with the good of the Bolshevik or Nazi state.

Our spivocrats won’t have the nerve to make such declarations overtly, but they clearly operate according to the same inner logic. Thus, for example, they’ve brainwashed the British into believing that it’s moral for a government to confiscate more than half of what people earn in the sweat of their brow.

The smokescreen laid on people’s minds is so dense that it can’t be lifted by a few dissidents demonstrating, figures in hand, that high taxation ruins the economy and increases the number of the poor the state claims to love. We can scream all we want about, say, the Far Eastern ‘tiger’ economies, which are so successful partly because the state claims only about 20 percent of GDP, give or take a couple. We can argue that taxing the economy at twice that proportion (or, in many Western counties, even more) is the chief contributing factor to the present crisis. We can beseech people to glance around them in search of proof that capitalist production can’t support socialist distribution – not indefinitely at any rate.

Such arguments, though factually unassailable, convince a brainwashed statist no more than the incontrovertible scientific refutation of Darwinism stops Richard Dawkins mouthing illiterate twaddle. Statism isn’t real political thinking and Darwinism isn’t real science – they are two confessions of a surrogate secular religion.

While the real religion has produced the grandeur of Western civilisation, the puny pseudoreligion can only deliver either concentration camps or a cozy, soulless hell for the whole family. Regimes that deliver the former are called totalitarian. Regimes that deliver the latter are in fact neo-totalitarian, though they cover their faces with an increasingly tattered democratic mask.

Take the camps away from totalitarian regimes, and they’ll collapse. Take some philistine comfort away from neo-totalitarian ones, and they won’t survive either. When people’s vision is sharpened by privation, they’ll see through the mask.

In 1913,when modernity was getting into high gear, the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was passed, empowering the Congress to levy federal income tax as it saw fit. In debating the bill, the honourable gentlemen laughingly mentioned 10 percent as a nightmarishly high rate never to be achieved or indeed imagined. A generation later their colleagues were joyously taxing high incomes at 90 percent, thus vindicating the thin-end-of-the-wedge theory of state aspirations. This was accompanied by brainwashing so successful that Charles Lindbergh (who, as a Nazi sympathiser, wasn’t immune to statist propaganda) would add 10 percent to his tax bill because he was ‘proud to be an American’. Proud to be a statist, was more like it.

The only purpose of high taxes in peacetime is increasing the power of the state over the individual, thereby effectively converting a formerly Western state into a neo-totalitarian one. I can’t think offhand of a more immoral objective, and yet even our ill-informed prelates argue for the ‘morality’ of extortionist taxation.

They ignore overt pronouncements by neo-totalitarians, such as Gordon Brown. When still Chancellor, he dropped the mask by claiming that his government ‘let people keep more of their money.’ As you can let others keep only something that legitimately belongs to you, the message was clear: our money belongs to the state, which decides how much it’ll let us keep for sustenance. Stalin operated on the same logic, if by different means. So did those pyramid-building pharaohs. 

There are still enough people around who refuse to equate goodness with the good of the state. They meekly appeal to what they call Western tradition for fear of calling it what it truly is: Judaeo-Christian, which is to say real, morality. But even such reticence won’t be tolerated by our neo-totalitarian spivocrats. Like wild animals, they can smell danger a mile away. And then they pounce – on everything that remotely resembles Western tradition, and everyone who fights to preserve it.

Their weapons are multifarious, and punitive taxation is only one of them. Mass immigration, especially from societies historically hostile to the West, also acts in that capacity by both diluting – often marginalising – the traditional culture and multiplying the number of those directly dependent on the state. 

Political correctness is another such weapon for, in common with classic totalitarians, the neo variety have grasped the coercive potential of language. If people can be made to talk in a certain way, they can be made to think in the same way, and changing the way people think is a time-honoured totalitarian objective. Moreover, by enforcing political correctness through the courts, the neo-totalitarians unleash a whole raft of anti-traditionalist minority activists who may be a bit unsavoury and occasionally violent, but whose desiderata coincide with those of the state.

Why can’t our government cut tax rates, say, to a flat 20 percent, with the low earners exempt altogether? After all, every bit of empirical evidence proves that the economy will thrive as a result. Why can’t it prevent vociferous, aggressive minorities from imposing their will on a silent, yet decent majority? This would improve society’s moral health no end.

The answer is simple: because by doing so the state will increase people’s power at the expense of its own. Neo-totalitarians will never accept that. And for the time being they can count on those who have swallowed their moralising canards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Baron Pierre de Coubertin coined the Olympic slogan ‘Citius, altius, fortius’ (‘faster, higher, stronger’), what he had in mind was athletes – not the ground-to-air missiles deployed to protect them.

But the beauty of that slogan is in its easy adaptability to modern conditions, where AA defences at sporting arenas are as essential as the arenas themselves. One gets the feeling that perhaps the Olympic ideal has lost its universal magnetic power, if it ever had it. Unless of course by magnetic power we mean the sort of devices that can be so profitably rigged to car doors.

Mach 2.5 Rapier missile systems to be deployed at Epping, Enfield, Blackheath and Greenwich are rather more sophisticated than the kit normally associated with sporting events. True, they are fast, high and strong, but they are designed to defeat bandits at four o’clock, not opponents in 100-metre sprints.

I do have my misgivings about those things, especially in light of the austerity programme currently underway. Our armed forces provide the only public service the British are good at, and yet it’s this service that has suffered the only meaningful cuts. And in this context ‘meaningful’ means ‘debilitating’.

We already know our military no longer has the wherewithal to launch another South Atlantic operation (but please don’t tell it to the Argies). So what makes you think that, come August, we’ll still have enough trained personnel to operate those Rapiers? Call me a sceptic and all that, but I fear that the launchers will be manned, or rather personed, by social workers, whose number is growing fast, austerity or no austerity.

Call me even a worse sceptic, but I also fear that even after a crash course in AA tactics they still will be unable to tell the difference between a rogue plane about to crash into a stadium and a 747 descending on Heathrow. I’d postpone that holiday in Spain till September, or else take it in July, if I were you.

And as to the 7,500 soldiers to be deployed as guards, forget it. Dave will make sure that by that time we won’t have so many left in toto.

So those bandits at four o’clock may very well get through, and London’s East End will be pounded again, as it was during Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe. This just may provide that sorely needed incentive for the nation to unite again, to rediscover its self-confidence, to scream defiance in the face of adversity.

But we must go further in our preparations. For example, I would suggest a total blackout of London for the duration, except for Westminster when our spivocrats are in session. Issuing gas masks is also a good idea, especially if they are made obligatory for all Londoners sporting facial metal or tattoos.

‘The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well,’ said de Coubertin, and I agree wholeheartedly. Except that we must now expand the concept of fighting to include fisticuffs with any suspicious-looking foreigners, especially those toting bags.

To that end, I propose that all Londoners take compulsory courses in how to say ‘let’s see what’s in your bag, sunshine’ in 49 different languages. Here’s my starter for 49: that’ll be ‘Fais voir ce que t’as dans ton sac, mon mec’ in French, ‘Muestre lo que tenes en tu bolsa, hombre’ in Spanish and ‘Pokazhi shto u tebia v meshke, suka’ in Russian. Can’t tell you the Arabic for it – let real linguists (and martial arts coaches) take it from here.

Training and preparation are the secret of Olympic success, including the success defined in terms of wartime defences. The Olympic spirit is dead, long live the spirit of the Blitz, I say.

You may ask whether the whole travesty, which has become little more than a vehicle for assorted tyrannies to advertise themselves, is really worth the trouble. Whether it would be better to save the billions we are tossing at this spectacle and reroute them where they are really needed.

You may be right to ask these questions – before the Olympics. But do get them off your chest now. Once the Games start, such scepticism may be treated as treason, and you may be tried according to martial law, with the firing squad awaiting. Your grandparents didn’t question whether it was all worth it during the Blitz, did they?

 

 

 

The other day the French authorities impounded some £11 million belonging to that worthy London resident Boris Berezovsky. The money, they declared, had been acquired in criminal ways and therefore its owner can’t claim legitimate property rights. As the French acted at the behest of the Russian government, which is itself  criminal, their reasons are questionable. But their action does raise interesting issues.

I’m not going to explore how Boris has made his billions. If you’re interested in the subject, read an excellent book Godfather in the Kremlin by Paul Klebnikov. The eponymous godfather is no longer in the Kremlin – having fallen out with Putin, he now resides in England. And Klebnikov is no longer alive – in 2004, as he was researching another book on Russia’s organised crime, he died in a hail of bullets fired (one hears by Chechens) from a passing car in central Moscow.

True to its heritage, Putin’s government spread the rumour that Klebnikov had been killed by a jealous husband. Of course he was. The MO proves that: two men firing submachine guns from a fast-moving car. Love does work in mysterious ways, especially in Putin’s Russia.

And now yet another Mafia hit, this time in London, reminds us that Russian ‘businessmen’ are just as capable of settling their disputes at our doorstep. The only sane response to this is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). Yet this is a response we are unlikely to give.

Pecunia non olet (‘money doesn’t stink’), said the Roman emperor Vespasian when questioned about his tax on the urine sold by public lavatories to tanners. Vespasian was rather crude even by the standards of Roman emperors, so he can be forgiven for his soldierly directness.

What is upsetting is that after two millennia of subsequent civilisation we still haven’t outlived the principle first enunciated by Vespasian. Except that we couch it in legal cant based on property rights, a subject dear to every conservative heart. However, much as we worship this or any other right, we shouldn’t allow it to turn into a suicide pact. Society has a superseding right to protect itself.

Ever since the ‘collapse’ of the Soviet Union, Russian billionaires have been arriving in England, first in a trickle, lately in a stream. A good chunk of their money arrives with them, and we welcome it. The British can’t afford to buy £40-million houses; good job someone can. Who cares how that £40 million was earned? Pecunia non olet!

Everyone knows, or ought to know, that no one can become a billionaire in today’s Russia without engaging in activities that in any civilised country would land their perpetrator in prison. Since the KGB mafia fronted by Putin controls Russia’s economy, no Russian can become a billionaire without active cooperation with it, if only by paying protection money. And since the mafia is criminal, every Russian billionaire is, as a minimum, its accessory.

They all, possibly with one or two exceptions, have a criminal mentality, and they bring it to London along with their money. We close our eyes on the former because we like the latter. Pecunia non olet!

So we let the likes of Abramovich, Berezovsky and Lord Mandelson’s best friend Deripaska come to London. Their billions are welcomed, as long as we are sure they use our courts, not our dark alleys, to settle their disagreements. Meanwhile, Sloanie dimwits are falling all over themselves to get an invitation to Abramovich’s box at Stamford Bridge.

Girls previously only interested in the hats they were going to wear at this year’s Ascot now profess interest in holding midfielders, wingbacks and second strikers. Thanks to Abramovich’s money footie has become their nostalgie de la boue, today’s answer to the fashionable slumming of yesteryear. And the provenance of the money? Who cares? Pecunia non olet, and those who still remember their Roedean Latin won’t even need a translation.

One would think that the six shots fired into Gherman Gorbuntsov’s body would serve as a wake-up call, even though Gherman himself can hardly be confused with a boy scout. Wanted in Moldova and Russia for the sort of dealings that would tip the Old Bailey scales at the better part of 25 years, he already did some time back in the early 1990s. I don’t know what the charge was in Russia, but I’m willing to bet it wasn’t dissent.

And then Gherman committed the ultimate mafia crime of squealing. Specifically, he agreed to give evidence in the case involving another attempted murder, of the chap whose son at one point owned another English football club. (What is it about football that attracts those people? Why not polo? Go straight to the top, I say.) The death penalty is the only possible punishment, and silly Gherman thought they wouldn’t get to him in London. Little did he realise that, just as the ruling mafia had turned Moscow into the Wild West, so it was turning London into Moscow.

Miraculously, Gherman has survived and now he’s busily naming names, those who ordered the hit. One suspects his loquacity is the price Scotland Yard has demanded for its protection, but be that as it may Gorbuntsov has now pointed a finger at several chaps close to Putin himself. So when he recovers from his wounds, he’ll probably be allowed to stay here, until next time. After all, pecunia non olet, and his money is as good as anyone else’s.

I don’t know if Putin did commission the murder, and frankly I don’t care. It’s enough for me to know that this unrepentant officer in history’s most murderous organisation is perfectly capable of it. What I do care about is the moral damage these Russians are doing to us. Pecunia non olet? You bet it does. It smells of blood spilled in London streets. It stinks of the Faustian deal we’ve struck. It reeks of a society in decay. Are you holding your nostrils? I am.

 

 

 

 

 

A week ago Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Britain’s senior Catholic cleric,delivered the kind of courageous message Anglican prelates tend to save until their retirement.

He referred to same-sex marriage as a ‘grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right’, adding that Dave’s chosen re-election stratagem would ‘shame the United Kingdom in the eyes of the world’. It represents, he said, ‘an attempt to redefine marriage for the whole of society at the behest of a small minority of activists’.

Truer words have seldom been spoken. And the man who spoke them is qualified to do so: marriage being an ancient Christian sacrament, His Eminence was clearly staying within his remit. It is part of his job to comment on any moral choice we face, and such a choice is discernible behind everything in life.

Economic decisions, for example, can – or rather should – never be amoral. Whenever they are, they backfire not only on morality but also on the economy. The present state of the economy was caused precisely by divorcing economics from morality, be that on the part of our governments, financial institutions or indeed us, the public.

But while morality should be an integral part of economic policy, it can’t be the only part. Moral decisions must be taken side by side with purely technical ones, and a true test of statesmanship is the ability to make sure the two aren’t in conflict. Hence a Christian, and especially a clergyman, should refrain from comments on the economy unless he is able to show that Christian moral goals can coexist with successful economic policies.

Cardinal O’Brien’s comments on the economy show that he simply doesn’t understand how Christianity relates to the economy. His Eminence has attacked Dave’s economic policy (and God knows it’s eminently attackable) at just about its sole strong point: opposition to the EU’s tax on financial transactions.

‘I am saying to the prime minister, look, don’t just protect your very rich colleagues in the financial industry, consider the moral obligation to help the poor of our country,’ declares the cardinal. With all humility and respect, this is nonsense. Not the commitment to helping the poor – this is basic Christianity. What is nonsensical is the cardinal’s belief that this or any other tax will serve this purpose. In fact, it’ll achieve exactly the opposite.

His Eminence correctly counts among the poor, or rather the poorer, those pensioners whom the current crisis has robbed of their life’s savings. However, what little money is still left in their pension funds is at the mercy of exactly the kind of transactions the economically illiterate cardinal wishes to tax and thereby hurt. This is just one specific example of his insufficient grasp of economic realities. But the cardinal’s real problem is deeper than that.

While, as we know, the poor will always be with us, the success of an economy is measured by how few of the poor still remain. The briefest of glances at any successful modern economy will provide irrefutable proof that it’s not wealth redistribution but wealth generation that reduces poverty. And the two are at odds: the more redistribution, the less growth. This stands to reason: a free-market economy is not a cake that’s baked to a set zero-sum size, and anyone grabbing a large slice will consign everyone else to smaller ones. A dynamic economy doesn’t stay the same size; it grows.

In such economies it’s hard, though not quite impossible, to become rich without helping others to stop being poor. One has to admit sorrowfully that the pre-Christian Chinese understood this simple give-and-take of economics much better than His Eminence does. ‘When the rich lose their money, the poor starve,’ they said, and if modern history proves anything at all, it’s this folksy wisdom.

One hears in the cardinal’s pronouncements the echoes of the harebrained belief that Christianity has much in common with socialism, which is usually held by those who love the latter and hated the former. If they understood either, they’d realise that in essence Christianity isn’t just different from socialism but opposite to it. Good works, of which charity takes pride of place, serve not just a material purpose but above all a spiritual one. A gift generously offered and humbly received doesn’t just improve the recipient’s finances – it elevates both parties’ souls and moves them a tiny step closer to salvation.

Socialism, on the other hand, is by definition materialist and therefore atheist. Its objective isn’t salvation but ‘happiness’, understood in the vulgar modern way. Socialism makes recipients of state handouts not grateful but resentful. And it makes the overtaxed rich run away, leaving the economy so much worse off and the poor so much more numerous.

Nor will His Eminence find many examples of socialist countries where Christianity has thrived. I, on the other hand, could cite dozens where Christians have been persecuted. Those same lands have also multiplied poverty by orders of magnitude, compared to countries where it was understood that the great success of the few produces a moderate success of the many.

‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ said that famous proto-conservative, meaning that his kingdom was higher than this world. But Christ also showed in his own person that the two kingdoms are in fact one. This is the essence of the Christian doctrine, a general guide as it were. However, figuring out the details of how the two worlds interact is no easy matter. By his ill-judged pronouncements Cardinal O’Brien has shown just how difficult it is.

 

 

Americans, lovable as they generally are, have this annoying tendency to suggest, explicitly or implicitly, that they’ve solved every little problem in life. Out of morbid curiosity hordes of them do visit that overseas country called Europe every year, only to remind themselves how much better the US of A is.

An American reader of one of my books, a professor of something or other, once wrote to me, ‘You Europeans are welcome to your music and cathedrals. Here in America we have something much more important.’ He didn’t specify what that was, leaving me to infer that he probably meant that panacea for all ills: democracy, American style.

Americans, especially those of the neoconservative persuasion, have lifted universal suffrage to the moral perch of universal goodness hitherto reserved for God. In a way that’s understandable: in the absence of real God a surrogate is desperately needed.

By way of proselytising their quasi-religion, the neocons have whipped up a hysterical worldwide campaign for the so-called Arab Spring, which is a cryptic term for replacing unsavoury secular regimes with even more unsavoury fundamentalist ones. But never mind the substance, feel the form: as long as them folks down there vote like us, everything’s hunky-dory.

The underlying idea is that the moment Middle Easterners and other foreigners start emulating Midwesterners in their political techniques, they’ll eventually become PLUs – People Like Us. And, like the real thing, the quasi-religion won’t suffer much from contradicting evidence.

For democracy is the neocon God, and God never fails – never mind all those democratically elected Hitlers, Peróns, Mugabes, Putins and Macîas Nguemas (who gratefully murdered a third of Equatorial Guinea’s population that had voted him in). Nor will the God of democracy fail those A-rabs – a voting booth is all they need to become Western, if not quite Midwestern yet.

In the light of that one wonders how the neocon press will cover the news that Egypt’s parliament is about to pass a law allowing men to have sex with their dead wives for up to six hours after their death. I struggle to think of a way in which such developments show a closer proximity of Egyptians to the West – unless one wishes to suggest maliciously and falsely that the ensuing acts will be ballistically similar to those practised by some proper English ladies.

Not even such facetious arguments will be applicable to another piece of legislation about to go through Egypt’s newly westernised parliament. To make sure that couples will postpone necrophiliac sex until a very distant future, the new law will lower the minimum marriage age to 14. And to make sure those barely post-pubescent girls won’t be distracted from their mission in life, another law will deprive women of any rights to employment and education.

Let US neocons and their followers elsewhere talk their way out of this one. On the one hand, Egypt is now laudably democratic. On the other hand, their laudably democratic parliament will soon pass lamentably misogynist laws, those consistent with Islamic rather than Western jurisprudence. A case of clashing pieties if I ever saw one: democracy good, misogyny bad. Which one should come out on top? Beats me, but I’m sure neocons won’t let facts interfere with a good story, or rather fairy tale.

Perhaps they’ll point out that some American states also have quaint sex laws, so what’s the difference? Well, the difference is in the degree and nature of quaintness.

For example, in Illinois it’s illegal for a husband and wife to have sex while out hunting or fishing on their wedding day. Juxtaposed to that Midwestern law is the one recognised in most Middle Eastern countries, stipulating that, after having sexual relations with a lamb, it’s a mortal sin to eat its flesh. In Arkansas, adultery is punishable by a $100 fine. In Indonesia autoeroticism is punishable by decapitation. Moreover, one has a sneaky suspicion that some of the bizarre American laws are enforced less rigorously than their counterparts in the newly democratic lands.

Nowt as queer as folk, as they say upcountry. And the queerest of all are the folk who base far-reaching geopolitical decisions on silly pieties, woolly thinking and ideological afflatus. Come to think of it, that describes our neocon friends with startling accuracy.